


The Corpse's Bride

by flowerslut



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Everything is the Same, F/M, Soulmate AU, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:34:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27144589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowerslut/pseuds/flowerslut
Summary: When you’re born with a dead soulmate, what more can you do? (For Jalice Week 2020)
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jasper Hale
Comments: 8
Kudos: 35
Collections: Jalice Week 2020





	The Corpse's Bride

Disposing of newborns was far from Jasper’s favorite thing to do. He’d been forced to improvise as the years dragged on, using distraction, lies, and manipulation to lure the doomed vampires to their final resting place. Anything to keep their emotions from striking him harder than physical blows could.

He was finishing up cleaning out their lot—this year’s newborns had been a disappointing crew, not strong or skilled enough to help them gain back their eastern lands—when the strange feeling first took hold of him.

He’d been mid-sentence when he paused, turning to look around at the dark plains, their abandoned shack way off on the horizon.

The newborn he was to dispose of, a mild-mannered man who shook during battle yet had somehow avoided defeat all the same, turned as well, his eyes fearfully raking across the area as well, no doubt terrified that something he couldn’t see had caused the Major to stop and react.

Jasper brushed the feeling away as he turned back toward the man, lifting a disarming hand to give an almost-friendly smack against his shoulder, sending forth a wave of indifference as he led them forward. He couldn’t lead the man _too_ far forward or he’d undoubtedly smell the venom that was seeping into the ground several hundred yards away, and he’d understand where the rest of their new crew had gone.

But it was in that instant, as he was patting Niko’s shoulder, that Jasper saw it, bright against his pale, scarred skin. He froze again, and any air of comfort he’d been carefully cultivating vanished into thin air as shock set in fully.

Niko reacted the same as Jasper, jumping slightly to twist out of the way of Jasper’s frozen arm, his frightened eyes looking from Jasper’s face to his wrist, and seeing the sight immediately.

A gasp shattered the silence, and for the first time since they’d changed him the previous winter, Niko stopped shaking. Instead, wonder filled the man and he stepped closer to examine Jasper’s wrist.

“A soul mark,” he whispered, red eyes wide as he leaned closer—but not _too_ close, he knew better—to look at the tiny red heart that almost looked to be glowing. The man smiled then, still wracked with shock, and turned toward Jasper, “you have a soulmate! I—”

Jasper ripped his head off then, trying to act as quickly as he could to prevent the doomed man from speaking any further. As fast as he could manage he grabbed the remains and brought them across the clearing, tossing the body onto the rest.

He didn’t realize _he_ was now shaking until he realized he couldn’t light the match.

His eyes moved straight toward the tiny mark again.

There was no way he could hide it. And even if he did what his brain was currently considering, and if he ripped the portion of flesh away with his own teeth, Maria would know.

She always knew.

Maria, whose own tiny heart was now a tragic, black color. Her mate—her _soul_ mate—long dead and gone.

Eventually he lit the match, ignited the pyre, and turned to make his way back to the shack at the edge of the horizon.

If anything, Maria would see it, witness his indifference, and be pleased. What better way to pledge your loyalty then to overlook a newly minted wrist, fresh with the promise of true love?

Stomping his way back to Maria, he inhaled deeply, mouth filling with venom as he realized they’d get to go into town and feed now.

What was supposed to be the allure of love when fresh blood tasted so sweet?

* * *

It wasn’t until years later—nearly two decades since the mark appeared on his wrist—that Maria finally commented on it.

They were going over strategy for an upcoming encounter when Maria made a sad noise, her tongue clicking with pity as amusement began to radiate from her.

“Ah, muy triste.”

Jasper ripped his mind off their carefully-drawn map to meet her eyes. He didn’t need to follow her gaze to know exactly what she was looking at.

“Tu amor,” she frowned dramatically, her lip jutting out in a way that made Jasper suddenly angry, “está _muerta_.”

His eyes fell upon his soul mark instantly, but the red mark was gone. In it’s place, one that was startlingly familiar. A mark he’d seen on Maria’s wrist as long as he’d known her. A tiny black heart; indicative of a dead soulmate.

His soulmate, wherever they were, was now dead.

He forced himself to not care, ignoring the way the universe seemed to shift around him in that instant, and continued planning out their next course of attack.

His soulmate hadn’t mattered to him during their life; he’d be damned if they mattered to him at all dead.

* * *

When Lillian Brandon grew pregnant with her first child, she’d been elated. She’d been married for barely six months when her body began to weaken as her stomach began to expand. It was a hard, unforgiving pregnancy, but Lillian kept her spirits high, too excited about the prospect of a child of her own to care. 

Edgar, her husband, wasn’t a warm man. If anything, ‘business’ man could go at the top of the list of words used to describe him. She was sure he had colleagues with words far more descriptive, and far more cruel. But throughout her pregnancy, he pulled back from work, making it so that she never went without so much as a _sip_ of water.

Through the months her body was racked with illness, the pregnancy something her slight frame could just barely handle, and by October of 1901 she knew that it was nearly time.

Two days into the month Lillian’s health took a nosedive, and Mary-Alice Brandon was born into the world.

Born cold and unmoving, suspected to be stillborn, she didn’t cry when introduced to the world. Her eyes calm and open and _seeing_ from her first few minutes. Mary-Alice had all ten fingers, all ten toes, and a tuft of barely-there black hair on the crown of her head.

One thing Mary-Alice didn’t have, was a red soul mark.

The whispers floated through the hospital despite Edgar’s swift demand that her tiny wrest be covered immediately. While other babies born with a soul mark were all the same—small, red, and heart-shaped on the inside of a wrist—Alice’s had been different.

Mary Alice Brandon had been stamped with a full black mark, indicating something that only older adults and those struck by tragedy knew: a dead soulmate.

After Lillian was stable enough to hold and feed her baby, she examined the girl’s tiny wrist, held the infant close, and cried with all of her might.

* * *

It wasn’t until the marks began to appear, that they knew something was wrong. Those with living soulmates enjoyed many features of having a person tied to them beyond what could be seen or felt. Some had dreams that were shared. Others enjoyed eerily similar tastes in food and aesthetics. Lillian Brandon had a cousin who could feel his soulmate’s pain as if it were his own; an experience that was as scary as it was rare.

Alice was four days old when the first mark appeared. 

Scar marks weren’t uncommon, but to gain them meant one thing: you had a soulmate, and they were being hurt.

Mary-Alice had been gifted with a dead soulmate from birth. When the first bright purple crescent moon splotch appeared on her tiny forearm, Lillian had almost fainted.

Edgar had been beside himself with frustration, demanding that local doctors and clergymen help fix his infant daughter, using sums of money to ensure the utmost discretion.

But the marks never remained for longer than a week at a time. And by the time the baby was several weeks old, she’d already had a rainbow of marks appear across her limbs, and fade within days.

When Mary-Alice was four months old, the first mark appeared on her face and Edgar swore to Lillian that no child of his would be caught around town with a black heart and a mottled face.

* * *

Lillian theorized heavily for many years, trying to make sense of the marks that appeared and disappeared on her daughter’s skin, despite the proof of her true-love already lost.

It wasn’t until Mary-Alice was a girl, attending school with as much cover as they could get away with under the Mississippi sun, when they grew alarmed.

“He’s out there Mama,” Mary-Alice had smiled up at her mother, her two front teeth missing. “It’s okay. I’m not sad. You shouldn’t be either.”

When Lillian had made Mary-Alice swear to never repeat those words to her father, the girl had frowned, nodded, and skipped away. Her hair was braided down her back, dancing as she moved, revealing a sour yellow mark against the back of her neck.

* * *

When Mary-Alice was eight a group of boys on the schoolyard cornered her. A pink mark that bisected her face in two had appeared in the middle of their arithmetic lessons, causing a bit of a scene and a hefty disruption.

Miss Palmer had dismissed their lessons early that day, unable to control the unruly class, some children jeering, others screaming at Mary-Alice, who refused to even look ashamed at the mark. And when the child refused to move herself to the back of the room to continue on with the school day, the frazzled teacher had sent them all out.

The comments and taunts were routine now, but she hated them all so severely for each insult hurled her way as they circled her, laughing and preventing her escape.

“Off to the graveyard Mary-Alice?”

“How many dead people do you kiss?”

“Enough to try and find your husband?”

“Is it true the morgue lets you check all the arms before they bury the bodies?”

“Aye, Mary-Alice! Old man Kemper’s been dead three weeks now! Maybe he can help you find your husband!”

“Maybe she’s a witch—she’ll show up in a few years with her undead husband still covered in dirt and worms.”

Then, the boy with the lightest hair grabbed her shoulder and turned toward his friends. Alice tensed under his touch. The boy, Wilhelm, always knew what to say to get under her skin, and to push things too far. “Hey, hey. Maybe she is. But maybe he’s deader than a doornail and always has been! That’s why Mary-Alice gets so upset. She knows he’s never comin’ to find her and that she’ll probably die lookin’ for him! There, there, Mary-Alice,” he turns toward her and frowns, patting her shoulder with fake sympathy.

The surrounding boys all began to frown and nod, some of them fake-crying as they called out “Oh, poor, poor Mary-Alice! A husband deader than a doornail! Long dead and gone and never coming ‘round for supper! A dead-man’s soulmate!”

Mary-Alice ripped herself out of her classmate’s grip, put her arms in front of her and charged, pushing her way through the boys who called after her even as she easily escaped their circle. “Be quiet! Be quiet! Be quiet!” She shrieked. 

As she ran back home, tears stinging her eyes, they laughed and laughed and laughed.

* * *

Edgar put an end to the girl’s schooling not long after.

It wasn’t until the third day of home-lessons, upon realizing that this was to be a permanent fixture in her life, that she threw a fit.

“It’s not fair,” she yelled at her father when he returned home from work that evening, stomping her foot, her fists curled at her sides. “He’s out there! I’m serious!”

“ _Enough_ , Mary-Alice!” her father had bellowed, but when he lifted his hand to physically silence her, the girl flinched backward, out of reach of her father’s arm. “I am tired of these ridiculous ideas! You need to move past this… this _soulmate_ business!”

“But he _is_ ,” Mary-Alice pointed to the orange mark on her palm, “he is alive! See?”

“You are to stay home to continue your schooling,” he spoke the words with finality. “Until you can get these wild dreams out of your head and control your rantings, you will remain _here_.”

And that had been that.

Mary-Alice cried herself to sleep that night. And the next night. And the next.

* * *

Mary-Alice was fourteen when she first saw her father with his wrist uncovered.

Well. No. She was fourteen when she saw the _vision_ of the moment in which she would discover her father’s uncovered wrist.

She would be helping Cynthia prepare for a walk around the block, tying the young girl’s bonnet under her chubby chin, when her father’s form would catch her eye. His back would be to them where he was standing by the door, adjusting the deep brown band he’d always kept fastened around his left wrist.

An act of clumsiness would cause the band to fall to the ground. And he was none the wiser to Mary-Alice’s attentive gaze as he leaned forward, fetching the band to reattach it to his limb.

But in the seconds it took for him to grab the band, Mary-Alice would see the tiny space where a heart _should_ have been, but wasn’t.

It would stun her into silence and she’d force her gaze back down to her little sister, managing a weak smile at the sound of the young girl’s prodding.

Back in the present day, Mary-Alice was still fourteen. The bonnet she would tie around Cynthia’s chin had yet to be purchased. And Edgar Brandon’s wrist was still firmly covered at all times. In the back of her mind she realized that in her strange absence from the present—something that happened more and more often as she grew older—she’d dropped a glass of water, sending it shattering and wet across the kitchen floor, but she couldn’t bring herself to react.

Shock was quick to strike, but betrayal sank deep into her bones, forcing her feet to remain planted.

Her mother had never hid her own soul mark. The white heart indicated that not only did she _have_ a soulmate, but she’d met them. Most couples with soul marks that were together had matching white hearts. She’d even once witnessed, at the market, a meeting of two people. She’d watched, stunned as the man’s red heart slowly turned to pink and then to white, the newly-acquainted couple hugging tightly as the realization struck them.

Now, she found herself stunned at an entirely new realization.

Her mother had a soulmate, whom Mary-Alice had assumed was her own father.

Her mother had a soulmate. And her father didn’t.

They weren’t soulmates.

* * *

The discovery that her parents weren’t soulmates marked a changing point for Mary-Alice. She realized her father would never understand what she was going through; perhaps he was even jealous, she theorized once.

It also marked a point in time where Mary-Alice’s visions weren’t just rare occurrences, but now nearly daily disruptions. She would walk into door frames and stumble down stairs. She burnt herself on the stove and her first reaction wasn’t to remove her hand but was ‘ _I wonder if he’ll have a mark here_ ’.

She refused to believe that her soulmate was dead, despite what the heart on her wrist said. She didn’t have visions of him. Instead, in her dreams, vague feelings struck her, bringing her hope, comfort, and a feeling so warm and exhilarating she could only describe it as love. She had a vague idea of what he _might_ look like. Tall, she thought. With honey-blonde hair.

He was peppered with scars. He had to be. The colorful marks she still regularly found herself sporting confirmed it. Maybe he’d been ill as a child, or an infant, and maybe the universe had been wrong to mark her heart as greyed instead of full of life. Maybe he lived in a horrible place, around horrible people who hurt him constantly. Maybe his heart was beating, just broken. Metaphorically dead instead of literally.

All Mary-Alice knew was that her soulmate was out there, and that she would one day find him.

* * *

The day they buried her mother, Mary-Alice’s mind was far away.

She couldn’t think about anything except for whoever had Lillian’s matching heart. It was surely as black as her own, now.

* * *

Her first night in the hospital, Mary-Alice laid on her cot, eyes swollen shut from crying, throat raw from the screaming she’d done over the past few days.

The nights morphed into days, and together they formed weeks, and then months.

The treatments grew stronger until Mary-Alice knew that she wouldn’t be herself soon enough.

During one of the last night’s she was lucid enough to recall who she was, she contemplated digging words into her skin. If her soulmate also received marks whenever Mary-Alice was injured, maybe she could send him a message.

That night with a sharpened fingernail she carved the words ‘HELP ME’ into her thigh.

The next day they increased the intensity of her treatment.

The following day she forgot who Mary-Alice was.

* * *

Wandering rainy streets wasn’t something Jasper enjoyed making a habit of. After all, humans stared far more when a person looked out of place.

He wiggled his toes uncomfortably in the shoes he’d recently acquired and ducked beneath the awning of a closed down marketplace. It was Sunday and the humans had all made their way back from their services to their homes. The occasional automobile would roll through the streets but besides that, the area was quite empty.

It was something that didn’t bode well for Jasper. He knew it was wiser to wait until the night to feed, but he was so thirsty that he knew he would have to seek out a hobo sooner than nightfall before his self-control gave way.

A young couple ran past him, their shoes splashing through the pooled water on the sidewalks as they laughed, enjoying being caught in the sudden rainstorm.

Their scent wafted toward him, causing Jasper to take two steps toward them, entirely unintentional. It was when his eyes caught sight of their hands, joined tightly and swinging as they moved, that he was able to pull himself together and grind his feet to a halt.

Two matching white hearts stared back at him, and Jasper felt his chest ache.

On a list of regrets so long Jasper didn’t realistically have the time to even _pen_ such a thing, disregarding the presence of his soulmate had slowly worked its way directly to the top.

It wasn’t something he’d given any thought to when his soulmate had been alive. And it wasn’t until years after that they he gave them a singular thought.

The night Maria had changed four newborns just west of Corpus Christi, Peter’s red heart had turned black. Jasper had been frustrated at the man’s distress for hours, abandoning his partner to the outskirts of town just to escape his emotional state.

When he returned that night, Peter had covered his mark with a torn piece of cloth.

It wasn’t until almost a year later, when he was slated to send Charlotte, a tiny, weak recruit, off to the pyres when Peter interfered.

“Look,” the blonde man had forced his wrist into his line of sight, Jasper smacking it away instantly with a glare. “It’s _her_ , Major. You can’t do it.”

It had taken Jasper a few seconds for the meaning of everything to sink fully into his brain. Soulmate. Peter had had a soulmate. And she had died. But really, she had been _turned_. And it was his job now to kill her.

“Go,” Jasper spat quickly, not giving himself enough time to think about what he was doing. All he knew was that if the pair didn’t take his advice in the next five seconds, his hand would be forced and he’d have to kill them both.

He didn’t see them again until years later when Peter came back, pleading with him to follow.

And with his red-turned-black-turned-white heart impossible to ignore, Jasper followed Peter, and didn’t look back

Except, of course, to think about his own soulmate.

Peter and Charlotte had been almost eagerly supportive. After all, if they could find one another in their strange little immortal afterlife, what was to say that Jasper wouldn’t find his soulmate? They dragged him from city to city for a few years, and at first Jasper wanted to believe them. Of course, the idea of seeking out others of their kind was an asinine one—Jasper was sick of killing—but discovering that the north knew _peace_ was almost too good to be true sometimes.

He’d last seen them four years ago. He’d grown weary. And their undying belief that he’d still find his person eventually made him miserable. In addition to the terror that haunted him with every hunt, Jasper had been barely holding onto whatever was left of his sanity for a long time now.

During his solitude he thought hard about his human life, wracking his brain for any information he could recall about soulmates, but he found himself coming up short. He couldn’t remember his parents names and faces, let alone whether _they_ ’d been soulmates or not. The only thing he was sure of was that he’d been born without a soul mark, given one around the turn of the twentieth century, and then soon after it had blackened.

Lifting his eyes, neon lights across the street earned his attention. It was a diner. Tiny, not-very-occupied. And with a quick decision he realized he could hide out in there until it emptied a bit more—and when the rain let up, he was sure that it would—he could help himself to a meal, and move on from this town.

He took one step into the street, pushing all errant thoughts of soulmates and soul marks straight from his head.

It would do him no good to think of things so hopeless.

* * *

In a small diner in 1948, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Alice found Jasper, Jasper found hope, and two black hearts turned white.


End file.
